Smashing Pumpkins Announce Reunion Tour For Summer 2018

Corgan and founding members James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin will tour from July, focussing on "songs from the first five albums".

Following weeks of teasing the possibility of a reunion, Smashing Pumpkins have at last confirmed details of an in-depth tour set for the summer of 2018, with Billy Corgan getting fellow founding members James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin onside.

The Smashing Pumpkins’ late-2000s guitarist Jeff Schroeder will join the band as they hit the road in the summer of 2018 for the ‘Shiny and Oh So Bright’ tour.

Marking the 30th anniversary of their formation, they’ll be “celebrating songs from their first five albums from Gish to Machina”, and “exclusively” playing music from those albums, according to a press release on Thursday morning (February 15th).

Smashing Pumpkins are reuniting for a 2018 tour

Running from July through to September in North America, the dates that the reformed Pumpkins will be playing were announced in a YouTube video at the same time, one which appropriately featured Ali Laenger and LySandra Roberts – the same women who appeared on the front cover of the band’s 1993 mainstream breakthrough album Siamese Dream.

“This show and staging will be unlike any we've ever done, and will feature a set unlike any we've ever played,” Corgan said. “For if this is a chance at a new beginning, we plan on ushering it in with a real bang.”

The reunion does not include original bassist D’Arcy Wretzky, as you may have guessed if you’ve been following the unedifying spat in the media over the last few weeks.

The band claimed that they had “repeatedly” offered Wretzky a place on the reunion tour, but she has consistently said that Corgan is lying, even offering up snapshots of their text message exchanges. “I honestly think he may have a brain tumour. He’s always been insufferable,” she said in a statement earlier this week.

As for guitarist Iha and drummer Chamberlin, it’s the first Pumpkins tour that Iha has been involved with since the promotional tour for 2000 album Machina / The Machines of God, while Chamberlin has gotten back on board with the band as a touring member sporadically since Corgan first reunited the project in 2005.